I think both Darwyn Cooke and Len Wein have done some great comics, but I can't see how anyone thought either of them would be a good choice for a Watchmen comic, since they both predate the deconstruction era (Cooke in spirit, Wein in his actual career) that Watchmen kicked in.

Azzarello probably can do the grim & gritty deconstruction thing, but if his Joker mini (which was an awful attempt to take the Heath Ledger "edgy emo Joker" TO THE EXTREME) is anything to judge by, his Watchmen will have all of the grittiness and none of the humanism of Moore's original.

Just watched the Ultimate cut of Watchmen out of curiosity. The Black Frieghter stuff is jarring and not-that-well integrated, but the added other (live-action) material def helps flesh out the universe a bit, makes the whole thing into a more agreeable shape. Also, I'd forgotten just how perfect Patrick Wilson and especially Billy Crudup are in it.

The violence, unfortunate old-age discrepancies (JDM's supposed to be pushing 70?) and awkward dialogue lifting still the principal issues for me. Still a fair sight better (not to mention more fun) than, say, TDKR.

Mr. Moore, who has disassociated himself from DC Comics and the industry at large, called the new venture “completely shameless.”

Speaking by telephone from his home in Northampton, England, Mr. Moore said, “I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.”

Jesus christ. This is just layer upon layer of unnecessary and stupid. I'd honestly rather watch a documentary series chronicling the myriad of creative methods employed in destroying all of the money would have otherwise been used to fund an inadvisable Watchmen television series.

If they want to adapt some Moore property, why not Top 10? Unlike Watchmen, the concept is tailor-made for a TV series. Though I guess the whole premise would be too expensive to produce for television?

If they did do Top 10 though, I'd love to see the flame wars that'd follow the transporter accident episode: "OMG, they stole that light vs. darkness monologue from True Detective!".

He had developed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen idea earlier, originally for Kevin Eastman’s Tundra outfit, with Simon Bisley slated to draw, but the idea expanded and turned into something else and veteran 2000 AD artist Kevin O’Neill became Moore’s collaborator on the creator-owned project.

The rest of “America’s Best Comics” weren’t creator-owned. Moore struck a deal with Jim Lee that would allow Moore and the artists to get up-front payment which gave Wildstorm ownership of the characters they would create in Tom Strong, Promethea, Top 10, and Tomorrow Stories. But soon after Moore signed the contract, Wildstorm was bought out by DC, and Moore was stuck working for a company he vowed never to work with again. As he told George Khoury in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, “For better or worse, I decided that it was better to forego my own principles upon it rather than to put a lot of people who’d been promised work suddenly out of work.”

Moore and his “America’s Best” collaborators continued their comic-book-making, and Jim Lee mostly kept DC at a distance, although a few cases of publisher interference would annoy Moore enough to remind him that the large corporate publisher hadn’t changed much since he had last worked with them. Moore and the artists were able to produce over 100 issues of high-quality comics before he walked away from Wildstorm and DC for good, effectively closing down the “America’s Best” line even if a few series still trickled out under various non-Alan-Moore writerly guidance.

So LoEG is creator-owned (which of course explains why Moore and O'Neill were able to take it to another publisher), the other ABC titles weren't.